Sunday, June 11, 2017

In which I descend to thoroughly trivial matters, including the farce which British politics has become in a matter of 24 hours

To be honest, the only reason I am writing this entry is that I was about to revert the ‘Election Special’, photo above for the original artwork, but I can’t: I made a copy of it and saved it to one of my many other laptops (and you think I’m joking: I still have nine, for no very good reason, obviously), but that one, the one I usually use and which is pretty much permanently at home in Cornwall in the kitchen, is as I write about 240 miles away (if you take the A303) or 260 miles away (if you take the M4 and M5).

But tonight, a Sunday night after my single shift at work, I am in London, sitting outside the Scarsdale Tavern in Kensington (motto: No Price Too Steep, But We Know You All Have Cash To Burn), writing on one of two small, but rather neat 11in Lenovo x121e(s). And I’ve just decided that in keeping with the utterly mundane, not to say thoroughly trivial, nature of this entry, I shall add a little more domestic detail (and replace the photo above when I am home again on Thursday).

I was here last Sunday evening, and drank two large glasses of house red. I then drank another, small, glass at La Pappardella around the corner from my brother’s flat in Earls Court where I put my head down. And as is the way of these things, I didn’t then get to sleep until almost 3.30am, watching I don’t know what, so when I woke – early as is the way when you go to bed late – I was feeling distinctly grotty and was bloody tired all day, a double shift. That probably contributed to it. What’s ‘it’? Well, hang on and I’ll tell you.

While at work, deciding what to have for lunch or supper, depending upon whether I eat lunch or supper is always a conundrum. The canteen food is usually pretty rough, and I am getting sick of my usual tuna salad/chicken salad from Pret A Manger in the Tube station. The thing is that I have long ago pretty much knocked bread, pizza and pasta – in fact any other wheat-based on the head, so sandwiches are out. It’s not a health fad or anything like that, it’s just that I find that since I’ve stopped eating wheat (within reason – it’s not an all or nothing thing), I feel less bloated, get less hungry and have lost a small, but distinct rim of flab around my tummy.

But last Sunday, and I gave in and bought two rustic rolls from Marks & Spencer just down the road and crucially a slab of brie. (I warned you this entry would be remorselessly trivial. By all means go and find something better to do, I really shan’t be upset.)

I had one of the rolls and a third of the brie at about three, then the second roll and some more brie at about 8pm. And that’s when it started – yes, that ‘it’. To begin with I seemed to have a belly full of trapped air, but the instinctive action of swallowing even more to build up pressure to release what was already there simply made it all worse. This went on for some time – swallowing air, trying to burp, not managing to, swallowing more air, feeling even fuller, trying again to burp – until about an hour later I began to feel sick.

Now, I’m sure pretty much everyone hear has been through it: you know in your bones you are will sooner or later throw up. At first you ignore it. Then you realise you can’t ignore it. Finally, with minutes to go, you rush to the nearest WC and, with seconds to spare, spew up everything in your stomach. As a rule, you retch several times, until your stomach is clear. And once your stomach is clear, you wretch again, pretty much bringing up nothing. But at least you feel better.

That’s what happened, and I did feel a bit better, though still very tired from the night before. I am usually due off at 10pm, but managed to get off a few minutes earlier, caught a convenient bus, and was at my brother’s within 20 minutes (for someone who works in London, I live very, very close, thank the Lord). There’s was no listening to the ten o’clock news that night or watching something inconsequential on Amazon or Netflix, it was just out with the light and heads down. And for a few brief minutes, knowing that I had a full ten hours of sleep ahead of me, I was in heaven.

The trouble was that just minutes later I began to suffer from stomach cramps. I turned sides, lay on my back, lay on my tummy, went back on my back turned again, but could I get rid of the cramps and could I get to sleep? Could I buggery. And this went on hour by hour (I kept checking my watch) until just before 4am I once again got that feeling – I knew – I was about to throw up. But I’ve nothing left in my stomach, I thought.

Well, my stomach didn’t seem to know, and it was another rush downstairs to my brother’s WC and once again I was (as the Aussies, who always have an apt phrase for most things, say)

talking to God on the great white telephone. And Lord did I throw up quite a bit. Where it came from I really don’t know and cared even less. Then the cramps faded, but my limbs, every single one of them, ached and ached and ached, the kind of ache you have when you have the ‘flu, and I don’t mean man flu, which is nothing but a bad cold, I mean the real flu.

My mind was pretty much made up that I didn’t want to be anywhere, but anywhere, but home in Cornwall in my own bed. Bugger work, bugger everything. The trouble was it is a drive of between four and four and a half hours and a journey I am increasingly beginning to dislike. Work was out – I wanted to do nothing but stay in bed – but the decision was whether to spend the day in London or bite the bullet and drive to Cornwall. I drove to Cornwall.

I texted my boss and the colleague with whom I was due to be working that I was making myself scarce and took off just before 7am. I was home by midday, after taking it slowly, and went straight to bed and stayed there for two days. I got up last Thursday only because I was due to drop off my car at the garage for a bit of work and to vote. Then it was back to bed. I didn’t really feel myself until yesterday. What was ‘it’? I really don’t know. And I really don’t care. At least ‘it’s’ over.

. . .

If you were to sit down with several imaginative scriptwriters and write a political farce, you could not do better than come up with the current political scenario here in Britain. I rather like politics and have been listening to and watching pretty much all the political programes on radio and TV, and there is - obviously - just one topic: the total disaster of her own making the prime minister Theresa May and her Conservative Party find themselves in. From pretty much every angle the woman is, to use a word with which I’m sure most of you are familiar, fucked. Truly and utterly fucked. And I must repeat in case the point somehow gets lost: it was all of her own making.

The Brits being the Brits, pretty much everyone except dyed-in-the-wool Tories are laughing their socks off. I know I am. And it does sound like a farce: The Tories ‘won’ the election, but, in fact, in the real world they have lost it. They had a majority of 17, now they don’t have a majority at all and if they want to hang on to power, their only solution is to throw in their lot with a gang of ten Protestant cutthroats from Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party and rely on their votes to survive each and every House of Commons vote.

Because the DUP is holding every trump card in the pack, their price for cooperation will be high. This lovely gang of thugs oppose same-sex marriage, denounce homosexuality as an abomination, want abortion banned throughout the United Kingdom and have close, though tacit, links with Loyalist paramilitaries. And they are the only friends May now has – she has absolutely none in her own party which is livid with her beyong description.

On paper Labour ‘lost’ the election, but in the topsy-turvy and highly amusing world which is British politics, they pretty much won. Corbyn, the ‘friend of terrorists’, the unelectable Commie-rat leader

(our press assure us) proved exceptionally popular with many voters, to the extent that Labour gained 60-odd seats. Even my plummy-voiced stepmother says she voted Labour. (I voted for a chap representing the ‘Socialist Labour Party’ in North Cornwall. It’s not that I support him, but I couldn’t bring myself to voting for the Tories, the Lib Dems or Labour, and he and some guy from the People’s Christian Alliance, another homophobe, were the only other two options. As I didn’t want to waste my vote, the Socialist Labour Party bod got it. And he got 197 other votes out of something like 45,000.)

The result in Scotland also proved to be a hoot. Whereas two years ago the Scottish Nationalist Party swept the board and hoovered up all but two of the 50-odd seats in Scotland, this time around they lost ten to the Scottish Tories. And Labour grabbed one or two back, as did a sole Lib Dem. I am hazy on all the details, but overall they lost about 20 seats, which pretty much puts paid to a second independence referendum for a decade or two.

. . .

Does any of this matter (apart from the entertainment value)? Well, I suppose it does. May, who has shown herself to have an ego well out of proportion to any talents she might possess, is due to sit down in eight days’ time to spend the next two years hammering out Britain’s divorce deal with the EU. And she hasn’t got a leg to stand on. Not one. But it gets a lot worse: although the Tories now want nothing more than to get rid of her, they can’t.

It’s not that there isn’t any number of Tory politicos who would love the job – and one in particular, that arch-buffoon Alexander Boris ‘Boris’ de Pfeffel Johnson – but who in their right mind wants to take on the job – for which read the impossible task – of getting even a half-decent settlement with the EU. So May, who I should imagine would now prefer nothing better now than crawling into some obscure hole somewhere and forgetting everything, has no choice but to carry on.

There’s a lot of brave talk from Labour about May ‘standing aside/standing down’ and allowing them to cobble together a government, but it’s not going to happen: even with the support of the Lib Dems – who aren’t at all keen – and the Greens, they still couldn’t make up the parliamentary numbers.

Finally, no one but no one wants yet another election. We, Brenda of Bristol and the rest of us have had two general elections and a referendum in two years and that is it: we don’t want one. And the final irony is that even if there were one, it would well end up just as inconclusive as the one last Thursday.

. . .

The EU, of course, is also laughing its socks off. Just like the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland although in a different context, they hold every trump card in the book. And it’s all very well, as May once trumpeted ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’, but it simply isn’t. We need a deal, even a bad deal. And whichever way you spin it that is all we are going to get.

This latter part was written after Fiona ‘Fi’ and ‘I don’t want to give my name’, her friend came to sit at the table next to me, but I know it is Gillian. They are American visitors (I think. Later: no they weren’t, they were Irish, though one lived in Canada for a while. We were later joined by Clark, an Australian) and have been celebrating something or other for a few hours in the company of booze (it would seem). I mention it only because I said I would mention it.